Marketing is an integral part of doing business that allows businesses to identify and attract new and potential customers to the business. It is also an important strategy to ensure that past customers become repeat customers.
There are many forms of marketing. However, one of the oldest forms of marketing is the use of information pamphlets to inform the public about the wares and services that the business offers. Such pamphlets can be generally referred to as “flyers”, but which can also be referred to as a circular, handbill, leaflet, or ad. A more comprehensive pamphlet about wares carried by the business may also be referred to as a catalogue, parts book, and trade literature. Collectively, such forms of information pamphlets will be described hereonin as a “flyer”.
Flyers are often used not only to inform the public about the wares and services offered by the business but also to convey information about prices and special deals, often for a limited time. For example, a grocery store may circulate a printed flyer advertising produce and meats on sale. In addition, the printed flyer may contain coupons that entitle the purchaser to a certain discount. This coupon not only entices the customer to visit the store but also provides feedback to the store about the effectiveness of the printed flyer in generating business.
To distribute such printed flyers, a popular distribution medium has been to insert the flyers into newspapers in order to piggyback the distribution channels of widely read newspapers. Another often used medium is direct home distribution—a practice homeowners and renters often call “junk mail”. However, distribution of printed flyers often came at great expense due to the number of flyers that had to be printed for distribution. Furthermore, environmentally conscious consumers often balked at the waste generated by the printed flyers.
With the digital revolution, businesses began to embrace the concept of “digital flyers”. Digital flyers (also referred to as electronic flyers, online flyers, and Internet flyers) offer a significant cost saving over the traditional printed flyers and are “greener” than traditional printed flyers. Thus, the digital flyers industry has steadily grown, with many businesses, having an online presence, using digital flyers to market their products and services.
Presently, digital flyers are created by scanning each page of the printed flyers. In order to obtain high quality images, scanning must be done at a sufficiently high resolution. Alternatively, digital flyers may be provided by the retailers, which would also be used to print the paper version of the flyers. With the digital images, the digital flyer is created by stitching together the various images in a sequence that corresponds to the paper version of the same flyer. However, because of the size of is the digital image, there is often associated a slow browsing time. Moreover, because the flyer is simply an image, there are little additional functions and information associated with the digital flyer.
More advanced systems for providing digital flyers do exist. Such systems allow for a more fluid browser experience such as the ability to zoom-in and zoom-out of the image and have mechanisms to provide additional information about each item in the flyer (e.g. product description). However, the advanced systems rely on browser plug-in such as Adobe® Flash or other proprietary framework that requires a bulky initial download and lengthy installation. Moreover, the proprietary digital flyer system that runs on such proprietary framework are complex and requires significant resources on the client's device (such as a PC, Mac, smartphones, tablets and any other communications devices) to run smoothly.
In addition to the burden imposed on the client's device, there is a high operational burden for the businesses preparing the digital flyer. On existing systems, in order to provide any additional information on the flyer, the image had to be manually labelled and tagged. For example, to provide information about products presented on the flyer, each product had to be tagged. This is a time consuming process.
Lastly, existing digital flyers (like traditional paper flyers) do not provide detailed insights and feedback to the businesses as to how and where the viewers were interested and interacted with the flyer. At most, digital and printed flyers may provide feedback about viewer's interest in a particular product through coupons (in printed flyers) or click-throughs of manually tagged items (in digital flyers).
Therefore, a new generation of interactive digital flyers that addresses at least some of these shortcomings would be highly desirable.